24/7 Wall Street, a financial news blog, has issued this year’s ranking of the Top 25 Newspaper Websites, and the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News again made the list. The article above will guide you through the websites, along with a brief commentary on why they were chosen. These websites are a great place to find ideas on features that newspapers of any size can use. This is the same website that produced “The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America” list, which got a great deal of attention when it was published in TIME magazine.
Category: Link topic
An article in Advertising Age reminds newspaper publishers that they might want to be careful about how high they build their pay walls, because online advertising revenue is still climbing. “Digital ad revenue won’t replace the print revenue newspapers used to wring out of near monopolies, but digital ad spending at newspaper sites won’t keep falling beyond next year,” according to the article.
Mike Orren, founder of Pegasus News, talks to The Convergence Newsletter about the operation and how they’re using data and citizen journalism to run what they call a local news portal. Pegasus is pretty popular here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and it’s worth checking out if you’ve never done so before. Pegasus runs on some high-end software on the back end, but there are certainly some concepts that community newspapers could employ using free online tools.
You may have the only newspaper in the county, but don’t just assume that you can never end up with competition because of the cost involved in starting another newspaper. For a look — and admittedly, a scary look — at what may be the future of the news business, see the article above. Two years ago, nobody would have dreamed that the scenario in this article could have played out in San Diego. But it is, and in other cities, too. And in the not-too-distant future, we’ll see more media start-ups like this in Texas.
There was a meeting in Chicago last week of top newspaper executives to talk about paid content. They heard a number of pitches from entrepreneurs who suggested new ways to generate online revenues. The link above will take you to a Newspaper Economic Action Plan prepared for the meeting by the American Press Institute, offering recommendations on charging for online content. There are all kinds of ideas here, some you may like better than others, but definitely worth your time to check them out.
Leah Betancourt of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has some advice on Mashable for journalists on how to best use social media. Her piece summarizes several policies that have been set by major metros, but also offers some practical tips that might be useful for to community journalists.
The Newport Daily News is trying an interesting experiment in online news. They’re using a tiered subscription model, with the most expensive tier being a $345-a-year electronic edition.
Alan Mutter (the same person who’s pitching an industry-owned ad venture) has an interesting analysis of newspapers’ cost structure on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, and points out that changing that cost structure could be the key to the industry’s comeback. Mutter is advocating a hybrid printed product that involves targeted, niche products combined with innovative online products. His plan is certainly easier to implement for small, community newspapers.
Ann Handley has an great how-to about using journalistic writing skills on Twitter. “… news journalism works best when it’s simple and direct, at least in the story’s lead sentences. And simplicity (and other tenets of good journalism — like brevity, and clarity, and immediacy) are now cornerstones of how many businesses, brands and individuals communicate on Twitter,” she writes.
Categories
Print ad sales down almost 30 percent
Statistics just posted on the NAA website show that print ad sales were down 27.9 percent in the first quarter of this year. Online sales fell 13.4 percent.
But the worse news was what happened to classifieds, where sales fell an astounding 42.3 percent.
Newspaper ad sales for last year were off by 16.6 percent, which the NAA said was the worse 12 months in the recorded history of the industry.